Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are utilized to process and purify water from industrial operations and municipal sources. In current implementations, the capacity of a WWTP is not scalable and its components are custom made for its source. As a result, WWTP components have to be designed to not only accommodate current demand, but any foreseeable increased demand. This increases the cost required to design, construct and maintain the WWTP.
Upon exiting a collection system and entering the WWTP, the first device or group of devices that the wastewater influent encounters is referred to as headworks. Prior art headworks typically include grit chambers, flow measurement devices and flow equalization devices.
Headworks may be combined with a dewatering device such as a screw conveyor (e.g., an Archimedes screw). This arrangement represents a rigid and a heavy construction which, even for relatively short conveying distances, must be property supported at least at both its ends.
In general, such screw conveyor systems are used to lift solids from a collection point in the fluid stream to a discharge point for removal from the system. These systems require mechanized components, which increases system maintenance tasks and costs. They also require daily or weekly inspection and maintenance. Furthermore, screw conveyor systems require additional water pumping and transport, further increasing operating expenses. Finally the form factor of such mechanized headworks and dewatering systems tends to be quite large and substantively increases the WWTP footprint.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.